Microstrategy Web

MicroStrategy Web is the main tool for most organizations to handle
day-to-day reporting and BI analysis. Its also the main place for
editing dashboards and visualizations. We’ll examine this portion of
the MSTR suite in more detail here.

The vast majority of workers will just have the web reporter or analyst
role and be able to login from any secured web browser to access the
data. There is no additional ActiveX or component needed. It part of
the self-service BI ability that most vendors tout. Users have a good
deal of functionality to work with reports, although specific tuning and
SQL work usually needs to be done in the Desktop by an authorized
person. Desktop is used to create report objects, administer the
metadata and security, and customize performance settings. Normally
this is handled by a limited number of users. You can also create
dashboards and mobile documents from within the web, within an editor
that is often times cleaner than the desktop version. Flash widgets and
functionality will obviously require Flash to be installed, and will
not work on Apple products.

It can be delivered using a variety of web server technologies, from
IIS to Tomcat. As part of the architecture, it is a component to the
I-server for handling requests for data from the datawarehouse. The
I-server handles the data requests and pushes out the resulting data to
the web server when an internet user requests a report. From an
architecture standpoint, it MicroStrategy best practices to keep the web
and I-servers on separate servers, although for a POC or demo its
acceptable.

A large part of the SDK and custom work on a
project often comes from integrating the standard interface with a
customer’s web services or internal or external portals. A common
revenue generating BI project involves publishing reports to paying
clients through the web interface.

MSTR from a licensing perspective considers three types of users here:
Reporter, Analyst, and Professional. Reporter is a base end BI
consumer. Analysts and Professional generally perform a more analytical
role and more detailed report building.